Search Results (342)

Policies for cultural heritage protection have increasingly shifted toward the integrated conservation and development of historical cultural landscapes. In vernacular settlements located in the southwestern border regions of China, some cultural landscape remains that were once widespread are gradually disappearing. Nevertheless, these landscapes continue to be recognized, valued, and maintained by local ethnic communities. Understanding how place-based perceptions are formed, how hidden cultural landscapes can be identified, and how their cultural significance can be interpreted is therefore of considerable importance. Drawing on landscape perception theory, this study develops an analytical framework that integrates landscape structure interpretation, oral history analysis, and local ethnic group perception. The archaeological remains of the “Ancient Temple” in Baiya City, located within the Zhaozhou intermontane basin (“Bazi”) in Dali, are selected as a case study. Through field investigations, oral history interviews, and Semantic Differential (SD) scale questionnaires, perception factors are examined across four dimensions—environment, ritual, construction, and psychology—to systematically analyze the elements shaping spatial perception. The results reveal that, although local ethnic groups exhibit relatively low levels of perception regarding the architectural form of the ancient temple, they maintain strong psychological and emotional attachments to ritual pathways, ruin landscapes, and related cultural elements. The remains of the “Ancient Temple” constitute an implicit cultural landscape that plays a significant role in shaping local cultural identity and sense of place. At the same time, it reflects the community’s capacity for self-organization and the latent mechanisms underlying the reconstruction of cultural space. Based on these findings, strategies for cultural landscape regeneration should emphasize the preservation of indigenous spatial order, the revitalization of local ritual practices, and the strengthening of ethnic psychological identity. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the social functions and cultural significance of implicit cultural landscapes in contemporary urban and rural development and provides practical references for their conservation and regeneration. Full article

Rural public art is increasingly used to improve living environments and reactivate place-based culture in rural communities. However, existing evaluations remain fragmented and provide limited support for assessing intervention effectiveness and formulating targeted strategies. To address this gap, this study constructs a multidimensional evaluation system for rural public art interventions and empirically tests it through case studies of 11 villages in Songyang County, China. The system covers three dimensions: material space creation, cultural heritage and innovation, and the reconstruction of social relations. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, combining literature review, field investigation, expert consultation, AHP weighting, and Kano demand classification. The results support the validity of the proposed evaluation system and identify cultural heritage preservation and transmission, basic and cultural facilities, funding safeguards, spatial accessibility, cultural affinity, and local cultural aesthetic compatibility as stable priority indicators. The comparison between expert weighting and stakeholder sensitivity further reveals differences between strategic importance and locally perceived demand. This study provides an operational evaluation system for assessing rural public art interventions and translates the evaluation results into targeted strategies, offering empirical support for more sustainable and context-sensitive rural public art practices. Full article

Vernacular housing in the Andean region embodies long-standing building knowledge, environmental adaptation, and forms of social organization rooted in rural life. Over recent decades, these dwellings have undergone visible transformations linked to migration, changing aspirations, and the growing presence of industrialized construction materials. Rather than disappearing, vernacular forms have increasingly merged with contemporary solutions, producing hybrid architectural landscapes whose local dynamics are still insufficiently documented. This study analyzes the material, typological, and functional transformation of rural housing in Las Lagunas and Quisquinchir, two Indigenous communities located in Saraguro, Loja, Ecuador. A total of 192 houses were recorded through field observation and a structured digital survey implemented with KoBoCollect. The information was processed in R using descriptive statistics, contingency tables, chi-square tests, Cramér’s V, and standardized residual analysis. The findings show that architectural change in both communities does not occur through a simple replacement of traditional housing by modern models. Instead, vernacular, hybrid, and modern/eclectic typologies coexist within the same rural setting, revealing uneven and locally specific processes of transformation. The clearest differences emerge in construction materiality. Las Lagunas preserves a stronger presence of traditional wall systems, especially adobe and bahareque, while Quisquinchir shows a broader incorporation of industrialized materials, particularly concrete block. Statistical analysis confirmed significant associations between community and wall material, as well as between typology and wall material, whereas the relationship between community and architectural typology was comparatively weaker. Functional changes were also identified through the reduction or reconfiguration of intermediate spaces such as portals, patios, and corridors, suggesting a gradual shift toward more enclosed and specialized domestic environments. These results contribute empirical evidence for understanding architectural hybridization in Indigenous rural territories and support conservation and planning approaches capable of recognizing continuity, adaptation, and change within evolving Andean built landscapes. Full article

Emotional well-being has become a central concern in contemporary educational research, particularly in contexts shaped by social and cultural diversity. However, dominant approaches to educational assessment continue to prioritize cognitive outcomes, often overlooking the affective dimensions of children’s everyday experiences. In this context, play emerges as a key yet underexplored process through which emotional well-being is constructed in childhood. This study aimed to analyze the role of play in the configuration of emotional well-being in sociocultural educational contexts from a sociocultural and relational perspective. A qualitative multiple-case study was conducted in two rural schools located in Mapuche territories in southern Chile, involving students, teachers, caregivers, and Mapuche knowledge holders (kimches). Data were generated through semi-structured interviews and focus groups and analyzed using inductive coding procedures supported by qualitative data analysis software. The findings indicate that play operates as a socioemotional ecology through which children participate in collective forms of life, construct relationships, and experience emotional well-being in interaction with others, territory, and culturally meaningful practices. Three interconnected dimensions emerged. First, play was experienced as a relational, territorialized, and culturally situated practice sustained through participation, collective interaction, and intergenerational transmission. Second, emotional well-being emerged through enjoyment, companionship, belonging, and opportunities for social participation. Third, well-being appeared as a situated experience dependent on access to meaningful spaces, material conditions, cultural repertoires, and opportunities for play. Participants also identified tensions associated with technological change, the reduction in free play opportunities, and transformations in community life, while highlighting the potential role of schools in revitalizing culturally significant play practices such as palín and linao. These findings suggest that emotional well-being is not simply an individual psychological state but a relational and sociocultural accomplishment emerging through participation in meaningful play practices. The study contributes to interdisciplinary debates on childhood, emotional well-being, intercultural education, and sociocultural approaches to development by proposing the concept of play as a socioemotional ecology. Full article

There is growing recognition of the health benefits that forests and green spaces provide to people. Forest bathing is a practice that promotes relaxation and human well-being through immersive, mindful experiences in forest environments. How forest bathing affects distinct dimensions of well-being is still not fully understood. In this study, we assessed changes in well-being before and after two and four forest bathing sessions and examined whether a brief introductory session on forest ecosystem services enhanced participants’ overall perception of well-being. Forty adults from a rural community in southern Chile completed the Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale to assess perceived well-being. Participants showed improvements in overall well-being after two sessions, with the most significant gains in relaxation, optimism, clarity of thought, and social connection. Scores remained stable between the second and fourth sessions, suggesting that initial exposure offers the most substantial benefits, while continued practice helps maintain them. Although the introductory session did not significantly affect overall well-being scores, it showed positive effects on optimism and social connection. These findings highlight forest bathing as an effective nature-based intervention to promote emotional and social well-being, with implications for policies advancing public health and sustainability goals. Full article

Metropolitan fringe villages are important interfaces where urban–rural factor flows, urban functional spillovers, and spatial restructuring converge. However, how spatial governance shapes the evolution of their territorial spatial patterns remains insufficiently explained. Taking Donglin Village in Chengdu, China, as a case study, this paper integrates field investigation, in-depth interviews, and remote-sensing image interpretation to examine the mechanisms and governance logic underlying the evolution of territorial spatial patterns in metropolitan fringe villages. The findings show that the spatial evolution of Donglin Village is not merely a process of land-use change, but a dynamic process characterized by the coordinated restructuring of material, functional, and social spatial patterns. Spatial governance operates through three interrelated mechanisms: element integration promotes the reorganization of spatial resources and the reshaping of material space; functional synergy facilitates rural multifunctional transformation and spatial value enhancement; and benefit sharing helps stabilize actor relationships and institutionalize the distribution of development gains. Policy and institutional arrangements do not constitute an independent mechanism, but instead provide boundary constraints, rule support, and implementation guarantees for the above mechanisms. The case of Donglin Village further demonstrates that spatial governance connects spatial restructuring, functional reorganization, and benefit coordination into a continuous process of territorial spatial optimization. This study clarifies the mechanisms through which spatial governance shapes the evolution of territorial spatial patterns in metropolitan fringe villages and provides implications for spatial optimization in similar villages under the context of urban–rural integrated development. Full article

The coastal zone exhibits complex resource constraints and environmental pressures, with marked industrial structure differentiation and considerable spatial stress on agriculture. This study enhances industrial cluster resilience by employing shift-share analysis to delineate industrial structure and constructing a multi-objective optimization model using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). The model encompasses industrial cluster-driven development, economic benefits, social food security, ecological advantages, and land use efficiency, integrating coastal-specific constraints including soil salinity, tidal influence, and aquaculture competition. An empirical study in Nantong City, Jiangsu Province, China, demonstrates that optimized land allocation achieves a 3.13% reduction in cropland area while maintaining 42.56% coverage, increases forest land by 0.28% to 75.3847 km², and enhances other land uses by 2.21% to 2169.6563 km². The multi-objective optimization successfully balances five competing objectives with an overall improvement index of 0.847, validating both scientific robustness and practical feasibility. This research provides a scientific basis for agricultural space reconstruction and rural revitalization in coastal regions. Full article

In China, policy-driven rural renewal projects have transformed many village public spaces, but some renewed sites are still weakly integrated into villagers’ everyday routines. This study asks why some renewed public spaces sustain routine use and low-intensity social interaction, while others remain materially complete but socially weak. The study was conducted in a rural township in Puyang County, Henan Province. Twelve renewed public spaces across several villages were examined through structured spatial audits and 579 resident questionnaires. Five spatial conditions were assessed: visibility, stay support, activity accommodation, interaction-supportive arrangement, and experienced locational convenience. Two behavioral outcomes were used to describe post-renewal vitality: use frequency and social participation. The analysis combines necessary condition analysis (NCA) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). NCA is used as a diagnostic tool for identifying upper-limit constraints, while fsQCA is used to identify sufficient combinations of conditions. The results suggest that experienced locational convenience is the clearest bottleneck condition for both outcomes. When a site is difficult to incorporate into residents’ daily walking routines, internal design quality has limited capacity to translate into sustained behavioral use. Among better-located spaces, high vitality is associated with several design configurations. The most stable recurrent pattern combines visibility, stay support, and locational convenience as core conditions, together with either interaction-supportive arrangement or activity accommodation. Low-vitality spaces follow a different logic, being characterized by the simultaneous absence of several supporting conditions rather than by the absence of one isolated feature. The paper therefore proposes a two-step diagnostic logic for rural public-space renewal: first checking whether a site is embedded in everyday mobility and then matching internal spatial conditions with local patterns of use. Full article

This qualitative study examines how menstruation structures the lives and futures of married adolescent girls in the Centre for Girls’ Education’s Married Adolescent Safe Spaces (MAS) program in rural northern Nigeria. It addresses a key gap by focusing on married adolescents and treating menstruation as a social process linked to early marriage, schooling, mobility, and sexual and reproductive health, rather than only a hygiene issue. Guided by an intersectional social ecological and menstrual health-and-rights framework, the study draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork. Methods include participant observation in MAS clubs, in-depth interviews, informal group discussions, and Hausa field notes from multiple rural communities, analyzed through iterative thematic coding and collaborative memoing. Findings show that menstruation operates as a “catalyst of constraint.” Menarche signals sexual maturity, intensifying moral surveillance, prompting threats or realities of school withdrawal, and accelerating pressure toward marriage. Girls describe menstruation as a “joy killer” and becoming “a shadow of myself,” as stains, pain, and shaming by teachers and peers lead to absenteeism and, at times, permanent dropout. Silence and stigma mean that asking questions can be read as promiscuity, pushing girls away from parents, religious leaders, and male teachers and toward sisters, peers, and mentors for incomplete guidance. Structural deprivation further individualizes the burden of menstrual management. Poverty, lack of affordable pads and underwear, and inadequate WASH facilities compel girls to “make do” with cloths and other unsafe materials, restrict movement during bleeding, and engage in small income-generating activities or kin negotiations to obtain basic supplies. MAS safe spaces partially disrupt these patterns by offering rare venues to discuss menstruation openly, learn cycle tracking and hygiene, and build peer solidarity and self-advocacy. However, the analysis underscores that program benefits remain constrained when poverty, weak school infrastructure, and restrictive gender norms remain intact. The study highlights how equitable sexual and reproductive health interventions must integrate menstrual health centrally, combining safe-space programming with subsidized products, improved WASH infrastructure, protective school policies, and norm change efforts. Full article

In many rural heritage settings, continuity depends less on static preservation than on the ongoing negotiation of space, governance, and cultural practice. This dynamic is particularly evident in transnational Hakka villages, where lineage networks, migration histories, and everyday adaptation continuously reshape heritage in practice. Existing research, however, often treats material conservation, governance arrangements, and cultural meaning as separate analytical domains, limiting its ability to explain the complexity of lived heritage processes and reducing its relevance for practical heritage management. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Zhongchuan Village, Fujian Province, China, this study employs semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and qualitative thematic analysis to examine how heritage continuity is sustained and transformed through everyday social practice. The findings identify three interrelated dimensions of heritage-making: material–technical adaptation, social–institutional governance, and symbolic–cultural meaning. Based on these interactions, the study develops the Three-Dimensional Cultural Interweaving Model (3D-CCM) as an integrated analytical framework for understanding dynamic heritage processes. By connecting these dimensions, 3D-CCM highlights how rural heritage continuity emerges through the interaction of architectural adaptation, governance negotiation, and cultural interpretation. The study further shows that heritage-making in Zhongchuan Village is shaped not only by local practices and institutional arrangements, but also by ongoing connections within transnational Hakka networks. These findings contribute to current discussions on sustainable rural heritage by emphasizing the importance of community participation, adaptive reuse, and cross-regional cultural relationships. Full article

This study examined rural pre-service teachers’ preferences for online learning platforms, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Moodle discussion forums in the Open Distance e-Learning environment. This group of students experiences digital illiteracy, limited access to assistive technologies, and network challenges, which may prevent them from optimally utilising formal learning platforms such as Moodle. They can, however, use Telegram and WhatsApp, as they regularly engage informally on these platforms. Against this backdrop, this study explored rural pre-service teachers’ experiences with Moodle and these social media platforms in an Open-Distance e-Learning space. This study employed a descriptive, qualitative case study with semi-structured interviews, guided by Siemens’s Connectivism theory. Fifteen student teachers from the College of Education in an ODeL institution were purposively sampled to provide in-depth insights into their lived experiences of platform use. The findings revealed that, although each platform served a unique instructional function, their perceived professionalism, safety, and interactivity differed substantially. Social media platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp were lauded for their immediacy, accessibility, and low bandwidth usage, chiefly among rural pre-service teachers from economically disadvantaged communities. However, participants perceived these platforms as unprofessional, disruptive, and unsafe. Conversely, Moodle’s discussion forum was viewed as a credible, structured space that fostered academic discipline through the presence and guidance of lecturers. These contrasting perceptions highlight tensions between accessibility and academic regulation within ODeL environments. Although prior studies support incorporating social media platforms into LMSs, this research extends this discourse by emphasising the need to balance accessibility, interaction, and academic integrity within resource-constrained contexts. The study concludes that social media platforms and discussion forums can complement each other in ODeL, encouraging student interaction and inclusion, while discussion forums ensure educational rigour, safety, and institutional integrity. Full article

Elderly individuals in rural China are highly vulnerable to extreme weather events and temperature fluctuations due to inadequate infrastructure in the built environment and constrained economic conditions, thereby increasing their health risks. Outdoor spaces represent one of the primary daily activity settings for rural older adults. However, existing research rarely links spatiotemporal patterns of outdoor activities to evidence-based thermal environment optimization, leaving a critical knowledge gap for age-friendly and sustainable rural design. This study focuses on the spatiotemporal differentiation patterns of daily outdoor activities among elderly people aged 60 years and above in rural Xi’an, as well as the optimization of spatial variations in thermal environments. Using on-site interviews, thermal environment measurements, thermal comfort questionnaires, continuous thermal environment monitoring, and machine learning based on random forest, this study drew the following conclusions: (1) outdoor activities in winter were concentrated between 9:00–11:00 and 13:00–17:00, while in summer, they shifted to the morning and evening periods, namely 6:00–9:00 and 17:00–21:00. (2) Models for outdoor clothing adjustment, thermal sensation, and thermal acceptability among elderly residents were established. The calculated neutral temperature was 10.19 °C, with a 90% outdoor thermal acceptability range of 9.6–27.2 °C and an 80% outdoor thermal acceptability range of 6.2–30.6 °C. These findings differ from those documented in regions with distinct climate zones and geographical settings. This discrepancy stems from regional climatic features, lifestyle variations between urban and rural older adults, and differences in the thermal environment quality of elderly-oriented outdoor activity spaces. (3) In winter, the acceptable period of the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) at south-facing entrances (10:30–16:30) was significantly longer than that in the courtyard (13:30–14:00). In summer, the comfortable period in the courtyard (before 10:00 and after 20:00) was longer than that at north-facing entrances (before 09:00). A random forest model for thermal sensation was established, and the relative importance of each parameter influencing thermal sensation was analyzed. On this basis, priority improvement pathways and strategies for the thermal environment, as well as suggestions for the subjective adaptive behaviors of elderly residents, were proposed. The research results of this study can provide technical solutions for age-friendly thermal environment design in rural areas, thereby safeguarding the comfort, health, and social well-being of the elderly population in rural areas. Full article

In multi-ethnic villages, public space serves as more than just a venue for social interaction; it is the vital ground where cultural integration and community identity take root. This study examines Cizhong Village in the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan, employing a mixed-methods approach that combines questionnaire surveys (N = 120), semi-structured interviews (N = 32), and Social Network Analysis (SNA) to compare the village’s planned spatial network with residents’ actual movement patterns. Findings reveal a significant structural mismatch: while the planned network exhibits higher density (0.32) and clustering (0.70), the behavioral network demonstrates a stronger small-world index (2.14 vs. 1.94), indicating that villagers organically form compact activity clusters around key social hubs such as the church and supermarket. QAP correlation analysis further shows that Tibetan and Naxi behavioral networks are highly similar (r = 0.833, p < 0.001), whereas Han networks exhibit weaker correlations (r = 0.527–0.607, p < 0.05), revealing a spatial pattern of “broad integration with localized ethnic preferences”. Grounded theory coding of interview data (55 initial concepts, 14 categories, 4 core categories) validates these structural findings and identifies the core theme of “superposed space of multi-ethnic dynamic sharing”. Based on these results, three optimization strategies are proposed: improving connectivity between public spaces, revitalizing key social hubs, and respecting established ethnic spatial traditions. These insights provide an evidence-based framework for managing public spaces in multi-ethnic rural communities. Full article

Rural public spaces are crucial to the daily activities of older adults; however, limited research has examined the effects of their environmental characteristics on older adults’ spatiotemporal behavior and perception from a multisensory perspective. This study hypothesizes that composite sensory environments have significant nonlinear predictive effects on older adults’ behavior types and satisfaction. In this study, 10 sample spaces were selected in Qingdao, China. Multi-source data were collected through a two-week period of unobtrusive observation and subjective questionnaire surveys (N = 241). Multiple logistic regression was used to analyze the main effects of environmental characteristics, and an MLP model with a single hidden layer of 100 units was constructed to predict dwell time and satisfaction. The results show that, in the investigated rural context, older adults’ dominant behavior was social activity (81.12%), which mainly occurred in built spaces such as squares. Multiple logistic regression indicated that, among the various environmental factors, visual aesthetics had a statistically significant effect on behavior types (p = 0.013). The MLP model achieved prediction accuracies of 85.3% for dwell time and 93.1% for satisfaction. The key predictive variables were volume perception (100% importance), the Natural Sound Index (NSI) (92.1%), and visual aesthetics (89.3%). Subgroup heterogeneity analysis further showed that older-old adults and those with poorer health conditions were more sensitive to pavement quality and physical comfort, whereas older adults living alone or with limited household companionship were more strongly influenced by visual aesthetics and natural soundscape quality. The theoretical significance of this study lies in proposing quantitative measures of natural sound and odor indices and revealing that, in the specific northern rural built environment, the coordinated design of visual and auditory environments plays an important role in improving spatial quality. The findings provide empirical support for the age-friendly micro-renewal of rural public spaces in specific regions. However, due to the limitations of single-season data and a relatively small sample size, their generalizability needs to be further verified across regions. Full article

Against the backdrop of two-way urban–rural flows and the development of rural tourism, public space in peri-urban plain-type villages now carries multiple functions at the same time, including everyday life, visitor stay, and spatial display. As a result, the relationship between spatial organization and actual use has become increasingly complex. Taking Xihuaiyuan Village on the outskirts of Taiyuan as a case study, this paper builds a four-scale analytical framework covering the village, street, node, and element scales. It integrates social network analysis (SNA), space syntax, behavioral path analysis, questionnaire and interview data, and image–text perception data collected from Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Mafengwo, Dianping, and Ctrip to examine the structural characteristics, actual use, and spatial representation of rural public space, and further introduces spatial–behavioral coupling analysis at the node scale. The results show that there is a clear structure–behavior mismatch in the public-space system of Xihuaiyuan Village. The physical spatial network is more connected than the behavioral network. At the street level, the village has formed a configurational hierarchy led by a small number of streets with high integration and high choice. At the node level, functional use differs between villagers and tourists: villagers tend to prefer nodes with stronger social functions, while tourists rely more on sightseeing-oriented hubs. These nodes can be further divided into four types: synergistic, structure-Led, behavior-led, and dual-low marginal type. Spatial attraction is mainly concentrated in visual elements such as murals and flower landscapes, whereas cultural depth and service facilities receive much less attention. From the perspective of spatial–behavioral interaction, this study proposes a multi-scale, multi-source coupling framework, which may provide a useful reference for the differentiated identification and optimization of rural public space. Full article